How many men have ever paused in the summer night to look up at the stars and give a thought, not to astronomy, but to the men who first slashed the Gordian knot of planetary motion? Of course, all educated men have, at one time or another, scraped the surface of the source of such facts. But, today we speak grandly of galaxies and consider astronomy an exact science and bow down before facts.
There probably does not exist a professor in the world who has not, unwittingly or otherwise, held the ignorance of the ancients to ridicule; and there is no field where this is more apparent than astronomy.
Some of the facts are these:
Early Hebrews and Chaldeans, among others, believed in a flat earth, a sky supported by mountains and which upheld a sea, which, in turn, leaked through and caused rain. The flat plain was supported by nothing in particular. Of course we all know this, but there is a worthwhile point to make.
The Hindus believed that the earth was a hemisphere, supported by four large elephants. “This seems to have been entirely satisfactory until someone asked what was holding the elephants up. After some discussion, the wise men of India agreed that the four elephants were standing on a large mud turtle. Again, the people seem to have been satisfied until some inquisitive person raised the question as to what was holding the mud turtle up. I imagine the philosophers had grown tired of answering these questions by this time, for they are said to have replied that there was mud under the mud turtle and mud all the rest of the way.” (Astronomy by Arthur M. Harding, PhD p. 4).
Twelve pillars, according to the Veda of India, supported the earth, leaving plenty of room for the sun and the moon to dive under and come up on the other side.
If you wish, you can find a multitude of such beliefs, all common enough. But there are two facts concerning these and their presentation which are most erroneous. By examining the above quote, one sees that terms have been confused. Men who ask questions and then figure out answers are, indeed, philosophers. The masses take anything which seems to have a certain academic reverence attached and cling to it desperately. The other error is considering that these beliefs were foolish and that scientists, laboring in their laboratories or observatories are wholly responsible for the ideas which permeate the world of thought.
It is not that we here wish to maintain these facts about the state of the earth. On the contrary. But, they are not presented for ridicule because they are the ideas which some philosopher developed painfully with the scant data he had at hand and who had to aid him no means of communication, travel, instruments or even mathematics. They are, what we chose to call, hypotheses possessing sufficient truth to be accepted. Today, thanks to Copernicus and all the rest, we know about gravity. Thanks to Newton, we have mathematics. Thanks to a lens grinder, we have a telescope.
It was stated in an early Sanskrit treatise that the world is round. Thales, Homer, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Ptolemy and others conceived various evidences which demonstrated that the earth was a sphere. In 250 BC, Erathosthanes computed the earth’s circumference, missing it only by one hundred miles (and he had no mechanical aids or “higher” mathematics).
Of course, these gentlemen made errors in their hypotheses. Ptolemy, 140 AD, conceived of seven crystalline spheres to account for planetary motion. To counter for this, long before (in the sixth century BC) Pythagoras taught that the earth went around the sun but erred in supposing the sun to be the center of the universe. Aristarchus, in the third century BC, and Capella in the fifth century AD, also taught that the earth revolved itself around the sun. Copernicus, in the sixteenth century, gave the world the system which is now used.
Now the point we wish to make is this, down through the ages, men have conceived various hypotheses with regard to astronomy. Concurrently, instruments were invented and other discoveries made and into the hands of investigators was placed a complete idea, plus the means of examining it. There has been considerable lag, naturally, between widespread belief and philosophic location of new truths. We are fond of thinking in terms of tomorrow. But, the future is written with the pen of the present in the ink of the past.
We are fond of believing that that which we now possess is infallible and not subject to any great change. And, when we begin to localize certain fields for investigation, science feeds wholly upon the statements of predecessors. Should a man put forth a new theory (there hasn’t been one since the nineteenth century), then he is no longer a scientist but a philosopher.
Let us remember our Voltaire and his admonition to define our terms. What is science? What is philosophy? Further, by knowing, what can we hope to gain by it? Will we benefit enough to talk about it? The answer to the last two is definitely yes.
To quote Spencer, “Knowledge of the lowest kind is un-unified knowledge; science is partially-unified knowledge; philosophy is completely-unified knowledge.” (First Principles, p. 103).
Philosophy is not the muttering of epigrams nor is the true philosopher merely one who can quote at random from various great works.
Consider an explorer, casting away, all too often, his greatest securities, even his life, to stride forward into the outer dark, throwing up his star shells to view what lies in the unknown. He lacks a vocabulary suitable to record his findings because the words have yet to be invented. He lacks instruments to measure what he thinks he sees because no instruments for such are yet in existence. He stumbles and trips, pushing ever outward on his lonely track, farther and farther from the milestoned roads where statements are safe and conversants many. He is so far out, that those in their safe, warm homes of “proved thought” cannot recognize the distance he has traversed when he first covers it.
His is the task of stabbing deeper into the Unknown and the dangers he runs are those of ridicule. He knows, in his heart of hearts, what his fate will most likely be. He may come back with some great idea only to find that men laugh. He may point a road which will be a thoroughfare within a century but men, having but little vision, see only a tangle of undergrowth and blackness beyond and push but timidly where the first to go pushed forward with such courage.
In all the ages of history, thinking men have been crucified either by institutions or the masses. But those very ideas, which at first seemed so mad and impossible, are those which science now uses to polish up its reputation.
Inevitably, the philosopher, the true searcher, is decried. But then, it is perfectly natural. His breadth of view is so great and penetrating that he can unify all the knowledge groups, taking his findings to discover a lower common denominator.
It is quite natural that he should do this, just as it is that his work should usually be spurned by his own generation.
Un-unified knowledge is that possessed by every animal or drudge. “A cake of soap cleans a shirt.” “A cake of soap cleans a floor.” “A cake of soap cleans the face.”
Partially-unified knowledge on this subject would be: “A cake of soap cleans,” and “let us see how many things a cake of soap will clean.”
Completely-unified knowledge on the subject would be: “Any agent which holds foreign matter in solution will clean.”
The argument here is quite plain. Partially-unified knowledge has become a group of men all anxious to assemble data on the science of soap. The completely-unified knowledge opens up a new vista, the possibility of discovering some medium which will clean anything.
And if you think this is facetious, know that there is no medium which will clean everything and anything equally well. It would be essentially destructive to a million volumes of hard won data concerning soap. The philosopher has come up against a resistant force. He reduced the matter to simplicity and indicated that it was necessary to search for a new cleaner, not a new method. Put into practice immediately and meeting with success, the idea would destroy, for instance, the business of hundreds of soap factories and would, of course, throw umpteen thousand soap chemists out of excellent jobs.
There is nothing being used today except those ideas given to the world by philosophers. For instance, Spinoza is responsible for most of modern psychology. Plato wrote about psychoanalysis in his Republic (in addition to most of our ideas on the political side of the ledger as well). Aniximander (610–540 BC) outlined our theory of evolution and Empedocles (c. 490–c. 430 BC) developed it as far as we have gone, originating natural selection. Democritus said, “In reality, there are only atoms and the void,” and went on to outline the theories of planetary evolution much as they are used today. The Ionian Greeks developed the major portion of our physics. Kant handed out the finishing touches, with Schopenhauer (a strange combination, this) on our psychology, Spencer on evolution; Newton put natural laws into equations and invented mathematics to work them. Spinoza went so far into the realm of the outer dark that no one has caught up to him yet, though the trails are being followed slowly and inexorably to the destinations he indicated. But science in each case contemporarily taught and used outworn systems and considered that it had reached an outer frontier when, in reality, science was always hundreds of years behind the philosophic frontier!
In short, science has the unhealthy tendency to isolate and expand that isolation, where philosophy tends to reach higher or more general laws. Give a scientist a theory (witness cytology) and he immediately sets out and collects gravitically all the facts pertinent to that one thing. To the scientist is owed the particulars. The scientist inherits the theories and instruments already conceived and smooths out the rough spots. The philosopher is challenged because he does not do this but, as we have remarked, he has no instruments, no tables, no aid of any kind which has reached as far as he has gone forward.
In this manner, science tends to group and then complicate any subject. It is to science that the masses owe their benefits. It is to the philosopher that science owes all its fuel. The citizen, seeing not very far, praises where praise is really due but not wholly due to the point where a scientist can laugh at philosophic ideas, the very things which gave him the material with which to work.
That science does attempt to propagandize its importance to the extent of origination is attested by the commonly heard statement that “Now everything is all invented and if one would desire fame he must specialize.” That word “specialize” is a red flag to any philosopher because it automatically indicates the localizing of knowledge into hideous complexities, which, he knows very well, will be destroyed just as all other complicated structures were ripped down when a new truth was isolated. Now it is indicative of the essential nature of science that it wars ceaselessly within itself in favor of this or that hypothesis as countering another hypothesis. It can be said with truth that the battles of philosophy are fought by science against science. Science comes along with measuring sticks of the already known, takes sides and begins to fire, without once inventing any substitute or new hypothesis of its own and ridiculing any which may be offered. So stubborn is science that it hangs to its achieved tomes like a bulldog. Ptolemy’s weird theory of crystalline spheres was taught concurrently with the revised Copernican System in one of the oldest American universities for many years.
This is no diatribe against science, it is a defense of new theories, new ideas, new concepts and the men who made them. The laughter leveled at the heads of innovators is amusing only if it be remembered that the ideas now in use were once equally ridiculed by science. And one has only to glance back with the perspective of the years to see that science has embraced many things much more weird—such as a hemisphere on four elephants on a mud turtle on mud, mud, mud. Doubtless, in this instance, there were a hundred libraries filled with tracts to the effect that the mud turtle had green eyes as against the opinion of another that his eyes were purple. Basing this on horizon stars and examining them as reflection, scientists of that day were likely very learned within their sphere of findings.
But there is such a thing as a cumulation of knowledge. By this, most men envision being swamped by facts and books. Libraries crammed to the roof, laboratories humming, men shouting in lecture rooms, men writing vast discourses on electrons and positrons … But there is no need for alarm. Ten times as much data has been stacked away in the basement where it molds, forgotten, the product of but fifty years ago but now disproved through the scientific acceptance of higher generalizations. Each time a higher generalization is reached, all men shout, “This is the ULTIMATE! Man can go no further!” But they forget, that in quiet places men are looking all about them, not at one special object but at all objects and so it comes as a shock when a perfectly simple truth which was right under everybody’s nose all the time, was brought to light.
Just as God’s connection with man and the Creator of the Universe (Prime Mover Unmoved or whatever God might really be) is pushed back step by step infinitely, so is all knowledge simplified.
Two hundred years ago (although it had probably been outlined already) science would have blinked at the idea of splitting the atom. Science dealt in atoms and molecules in that day and nothing smaller. Today every schoolboy knows that an atom can be split and remade into several things. A hundred years from now, men will look back at this atom splitting and shake their heads over such stupidity as thinking that an electron was the smallest division.
But how do we get to the point where we can look back? The answer is somewhere in our midst. Just who will advance the theory and method for releasing atomic energy is not important. That the possibility of doing so has been often sighted and that various means are constantly being proposed is the course which will lead to such a thing. And do not for one hypnotized moment suppose that the method will be born in any flashing, sparking laboratory endowed with millions. On the contrary, it will first be proposed by a thinker. The laboratory may later claim all the credit but that is of no matter, it seems, as long as men can then begin to write all about the mathematics of disintegration with which they will fill ten thousand libraries.
If this cannot be believed, if it cannot be accepted that all truths are simple truths and need only to be pointed out, recall that the splitting of the atom was a simple truth. Then, if it be a matter of concern that the only discoveries left will be complex and that specialization is paramount, remember that the discovery of the disintegration of the atom will scrap all the fine tomes (which fill ten thousand libraries) on the subject of internal combustion engines and propelling forces in general as well as all extant hull, wheel and wing designs. The only thing of these fine flights which will remain is the essential truth from which they were born.
Knowledge is not a swamping sea of facts but a long line of simple truths, each one more simple than the last. If one would discover the next in line, let him not in any specialized field but rather in a cross between two fields or more. And as a man cannot be specialized in half a dozen fields it remains that his investigations would have to be wholly independent of any rubber-stamped outlook. The atom disintegrator may come as a cross between botany and physics. Who would dream of such a thing? But already the newest source of energy is the leaf of a tree. Would a physicist, interested only in physics, have discovered that? It is doubtful. He would have to be more concerned with the entire world around him than he would be with his immediate laboratory bench. Strangely enough, the men who have isolated the greatest truths have not been what is generally known as “an educated man.” Widely read, yes. Intelligent, certainly. But above all, anxious to push into anything and everything where the devil would fear to tread.
This thirst for adventure into the abstract is the motivating force of all youth. Later, weighed down with admonitions that one must specialize, youth succumbs to the lure of security and forgets about those things he wanted to plan, in the scramble to read all everybody ever said on the subject of Trimming Frogs’ Toenails.
To be very specific, today the scientist mocks wild ideas about interplanetary travel, saying, “Wel-l-l-l, yes-s, it might be done … maybe. But …” With all respect to him, he is perfectly right. He has a certain job of his own to do. He will probably be dead long before man first sets foot on the moon. But that the dream, any wildest dream, can be accomplished needs only the verification of the source of most of our mechanical marvels today. Submarine? Locomotive? Airplane? Stratosphere and overweather? Typewriter? Traffic signals? Look at what you may and where you may, you will uncover “science-fiction” or a man interested in it.
The philosophers of the great general ideas are, of course, in a class by themselves. But as far as the advanced applications of various methods and hybrid sciences, as far as the forecast of our civilization, and indeed our very architecture of tomorrow, one has only to search the files.
Men have been writing “science-fiction” since the Phoenicians, perhaps. At least the first story followed soon after writing itself. Once where the “pseudo-science” sent a man west on an iron horse to fight Indians (which didn’t happen really, until many, many years had flown), it now sends men into the outer galaxies.
Among the scientists of today are many outlaws, not quite philosophers, but still intrigued by the ideas which can be turned up.
Looking back into the past’s dim depths one can see a great many “foolish” ideas brought to fruition. Looking ahead into the future, one can see …?